UK Video Game Chart: Guild Wars 2 is No.1

The second largest launch ever for a non-Warcraft MMO PC title, behind Star Wars: The Old Republic.

NCsoft's Guild Wars 2 debuts at No.1 this week, recording the second largest launch for a non-Warcraft MMO PC title, behind only BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic.

The no-subscription MMO is also the first PC-only release to reach No.1 in the All Formats chart since Football Manager 2011 back in November 2010.

Sleeping Dogs is pushed down to No.2, New Super Mario Bros. 2 is at No.3 and London 2012 continues to perform well at No.4. LEGO Batman 2 jumps up to No.5, whilst Darksiders 2 is showing worrying signs for THQ recording a 71 per cent drop off in its second week as it slides to No.6.

Elsewhere Madden NFL 13 is new at No.7 and Namco Bandai's Tales of Graces F on PS3 is new at No.14.

It's also worth noting that Ubisoft's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier is yet to fall out of the Top 10, 15 weeks after it was released – though some heavy price cuts have no doubt helped maintain this.

If there was an industry award for "Best Launch Timing" Guild Wars 2 and Sleeping Dogs would be in the running. Smack in the middle of the school holidays, nothing else around for a couple of weeks, perfect.

I bought both in the hope that they'd be good time-wasters until Borderlands 2, but both turned out to be worthy additions to my collection. Particularly Guild Wars 2, I had no idea it was going to be as appealing to me as it turned out to be, so for once I'm rather chuffed with my spontaneous purchasing decision which was along the lines of "Guild Wars 2 starts in a few hours? I'd forgotten about that. Oh look I've got £49.99 spare, shall I go for it? Hmmm, ok then...".